ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies

Your browser does not appear to support JavaScript, or JavaScript is currently disabled. This page uses JavaScript for certain types of content, so we strongly recommend that you enable JavaScript for browsing this site.

Given the undying popularity of superhero comics, how does one measure the impact
of these garish do-gooders? Surely, some of the legion “true Marvel
zombies” make it back to the land of the living. A select few might
even go on to craft other, more socially-acceptable literature. Which brings
us to Give our Regards to the Atomsmashers!: Writers on Comics, a collection of essays on possible comics legacies.

Written with a fan’s enthusiasm and tempered with critical hindsight,
17 contemporary writers contribute pieces. And by writers I mean playwrights,
novelists, rock critics, journalists & comics scripters. You should
recognize at least a few of the names from the literary American landscape:
Greil Marcus, Luc Sante, Aimee Bender, Jonathan Lethem, Myra Goldberg. The
resumes don’t matter so much as the strength of the pieces though,
and the results here are compelling.

Editor Sean Howe introduces the books as “personal writing about
this most personal of art forms. The truth is, comic book fans have been
tight-lipped about their forbidden love, and their ruminations about comics
have incubated.” Further, Howe divulges that “Many of the writers
I approached for this book told me (after asking, “How did you
know I love comic books?”) they’d wanted to write about
this for years, wanted to share their long-whispered lingua franca, wanted
to come clean with their secret identities.” While there’s certainly
no uniform tone to the essays, this voice of furtive, gushing enthusiasm
resonates throughout. It’s a voice familiar to many of us whose relationships
to comics, particularly angsty superhero stuff, has, to say the least, changed.

Each article gets a single full-color of comics art. Isolated, these images
convey the sustained gaze of paintings—an appropriate graphic choice
for the text. The multiverse of battling demigods (& their emotionally-stunted
antics) becomes infinitely more complex when pulled out from the realm of
escapist juvenilia, and into a larger focus of capitalist production/consumption
& cultural studies. Remember, with great power comes great responsibility.

Jonathan Lethem starts the anthology. A good choice given the relevance
of his 2003 novel Fortress of Solitude, which ambitiously (if
unevenly) wove the fates of gentrifying Brooklyn, Marvel fandom & the
better American styles of hip-hop, punk & graffiti. Lethem’s
essay focuses on the eternal debate about auteur Jack Kirby. Of Kirby’s
later, blatantly & hermetically psychedelic issues, Lethem writes “the
feet of his work never touched the ground. The results were impressive,
and quite boring.” Excelsior, indeed!

Further, Aimee Bender makes an interesting case for minimalist drawings,
positing that “the mind takes in simple words or images with ease,
then we’re freed up to expend brain effort in other ways.” Agree
or not, it’s a decent starting point for discourse. Like Luc Sante’s
almost-apologist piece on the blatantly racist & colonial nature of
Tin-Tin comics. Or Lydia Millet making sweeping statements like: “And
you have to have a story, right? Art without story is not enough for most
people; they need linear, forward-moving structures of myth to imbue their
own lives with meaning. Beauty is not enough because we can’t easily
glean meaning from it…The job is just too hard.” Granted, this
isn’t primary source material, but the emergent field of comic scholarship
shouldn’t shy away from such aesthetic debates.

While the pieces are more conversational than formally academic, Give
Our Regards to the Atomsmashers! comes highly recommended. You’re
probably already having these sort of discussions with your friends anyway,
so why not further validate them with another book?

All content is (c) ImageTexT 2004 - 2018 unless otherwise noted. All authors
and artists retain copyright unless otherwise noted.
All images are used with permission or are permissible under fair use. Please
see our legal
notice.